by Dan Pearce
Ackgri reached a slow and shaky hand to my shoulder. “That, Cain, is love.”
“Love.”
“Yes, love,” the witch said and smiled at the thought. “Love is all those things. There are just a few who have known love now, but when you were young, love was still unknown in all the world.” His last words trailed-off and he spoke quietly after that. “I wish to know love before I die.”
“Love,” I just repeated back to him again and again. I had always been right. Racheele and I had shared something unique and good. Love must have been the feeling I was sharing with Annia now. I thought of Annia at home, quietly lost in thought as she wished for my hasty return. That is love. Annia. Racheele. Annia. Annia. I suddenly remembered the reason I left her and was there talking to Ackgri at all.
“I am almost certain I can help you break free of your curse,” Ackgri said before I could verbalize anything. “But there is a steep price you must pay.”
I almost leapt in excitement. “Anything you ask I will gladly pay.”
The old witch leaned forward on his stone. “Cain, I do not desire your possessions.” I looked back at him with eager eyes and shrugged. What else could I possibly have to offer that he would want? He leaned even closer. “I desire the thing I lost long ago. If I break you free from your curse, you must freely give it to me.”
“Anything.”
Ackgri leaned back again. “I will tell you the price once I have broken the curse. I simply ask that you agree to pay it.”
I scoffed. “I cannot agree to a price I do not know. Tell me, witch, or I will find another.”
He knew I could not easily find another before my time with Annia would run out, but he granted my request anyway. “Very well. You must give me your virility as mine long ago left me.”
“My virility?” I demanded, suddenly offended and a bit angered. “Even if you could take such a thing, there is no purpose in breaking the curse if I can no longer know my Annia.”
The witch suddenly stood, and I followed his cue. “Cain, this is the price. If what you have truly is love, then you will know that you do not need virility for love to exist.” He suddenly began motioning me to make an exit, almost shooing me away. “Now, go and decide if it is worth the price you must pay. I know the magic that will give your virility to me. Bring your woman to Ackgri when you are ready.”
“Why must you have my virility? Surely you can take it from another.” I found myself pushed to the exterior side walls, looking urgently into his yellowed, now less peaceful eyes.
“Cain, you have loved twice, and you will continue to love when the curse is lifted. I have never loved,” he said with a cracked voice. “I wish to love another before I die, completely and in the way no other but you understand. Your virility seems to be something special.”
“But…”
“Go back to your woman. Decide for yourself.”
“How do I know you can remove my curse at all, witch?”
“You will pay me nothing if I cannot.”
“I don’t think…”
He cut me off again. “I will not condemn you for the choice you make. I do promise that you will lose the woman you now love in the same way you once lost your daughter in the past.”
I never mentioned Flor to this man. How this old necromancer seemed to know all things was beyond my understanding, but I could not deny his clairvoyance. I bid him farewell and began the long journey home, my mind swirling with the pros and cons of both options. I could keep my Annia while forever losing the ability to make love or to fuck, or I could keep my virility and most certainly lose Annia in the end.
Love. Stupid, ridiculous love. Now that I had a name for it, I began to curse it for the troubles it had always seemed to enjoy bringing into my life.
I didn’t understand just how important a man’s ability to get an erection was until I greatly battled my own thoughts about it as I journeyed. This love thing Annia and I shared would certainly cease to exist without my virility, so losing it couldn’t be worth it. What if Annia died after I lost it, or stopped loving me in return? I would be limp and sexless for the rest of my life, and for little reason at all. What if I could somehow find Tashibag, and another way out of all this, before I lost Annia? And surely, if I could no longer make love to Annia, she would lose all interest in me anyway. By the time I arrived in Paigurn, I had thought of a hundred different reasons my virility was far more important than whatever this love bullshit was.
Then I saw Annia, and I immediately knew what needed to be done and just how worth it she was. That thought was confirmed to me that same night when we knew each other only briefly, but pressed our exposed torsos into one another for what must have been hours as we talked, laughed, and I told her all the truths I could about my journey.
I told Annia of the witch, though I didn’t tell her it was I who had gone looking for him. “He told me of this thing called love,” I told her. And then I tried to explain to her what I understood love to be.
“Love,” she said, her face pressed into my neck. “I like love.”
I kissed the top of her head softly. “Love for my Annia,” I said. I felt her smile against my collar bone. Those words didn’t sound quite right. “I love my Annia.” Again, she smiled, enjoying the new concept of love. I pulled away and softly pinched her chin as I searched her eyes. “I love… you.”
Annia giggled. The use of the word in such a way sounded funny to both of us. “Love for my Cain,” she replied, then scrunched up her nose. “I love you, too.” It was a phrase that made just as much ridiculous sense, and which we would say to each other often thereafter. After realizing that night that the thought of my hardened member hadn’t even crossed either of our delightfully entangled minds in some time, I decided love was worth the price Ackgri demanded.
“I love you.” Were we the first to say those exact words? I like to believe so, but I don’t know. It was the witch who told me of the word “love” to begin with, so it is possible others said it first.
I read a blog post, posted by a married friend a year or so ago. The entire essay was a lengthy and sad rant on how overused the term “I love you” is in some relationships. “I don’t want to say ‘I love you’ every time we have a twenty-second phone call,” she wrote. “I don’t want to say it any time I leave the room. I shouldn’t have to say it every time we chat about something trivial. When I say, ‘I love you,’ I want it to mean something special.” This was her rant. I remember wondering how she would feel about it if she could look back through time and hear me say it to Annia that first time. I remember wondering if she would feel the same way could she know the price I was willing to pay to continue being able to say it.
I really wondered if this blogger could ever possibly feel the way she did if she knew the price Annia paid to keep that phrase alive between us, after we returned to the witch doctor and everything went horribly wrong. “I love you” were the last three words I got to speak to my Annia. They were also the last words she spoke to me.
It took some creative convincing to persuade Annia to make the long journey with me to see Ackgri. We left her youngest in the care of her son, who was now entering manhood, and journeyed the six days it took to walk to Buh. I suppose that journey was proof of our love more than anything. Without being able to tell her much of anything at all, Annia believed me that our ability to remain together long into the future depended on us taking it.
“Come inside, woman,” Ackgri said as we approached his home. He stood on the outside, seemingly unsurprised that we were there. “I have everything prepared,” he said. “Cain, you must not enter if my magic is to properly work.”
“This is very strange, Cain,” Annia said to me as the witch disappeared inside the walls of his structure. “I have a dark feeling within me.”
I looked her up and down, searching for a matching feeling inside myself, but found none. The thought of growing old with her overshadowed any and all hesitance I may have been
able to find. She had barely aged since the day she first saved me from the effects of starvation and thirst. Her skin was slightly more touched by the sun, and her hands slightly more hardened, but her eyes were just as clear, and her smile was just as kind. She was tightly wrapped in a softened sheepskin, her curves so familiarly apparent within. She wore a necklace I once made for her by fastening a rare blue stone with a long strip of leather. “Do you trust me?” I said.
I wish I had never said those words.
“I trust you.”
I wish she never replied that she did trust me. I wish she would have listened to that voice inside her that told her to run, and that told her things were not right. Instead she listened to me. She listened to me because she loved me. Fucking love.
“What magic must the witch make work?” Annia asked.
“I don’t know. Good magic.”
“I don’t understand why we’re here and I don’t feel this is good,” she said. “I do not understand what you think it is that will separate us one day.”
I unconsciously reached a hand up and brushed my fingertips across the mark on my chest. “Please find a way to believe it when I speak of reasons I cannot yet share. I am being honest about this. Go see this witch. You will have all the answers very soon, and we can return to our home and no longer have these worries.”
Annia somehow buried whatever dark feelings nagged at her, and she agreed. “I love you,” she said.
I embraced her tightly and inhaled what I thought would be one of my final breaths as a cursed-man in love. “I love you.”
That was the last time I saw her alive and whole.
“Make your way in, woman!” Ackgri interrupted from inside. Annia pinched my underarm and faked a smile. I released her and she disappeared around the witch’s walls.
One minute and thirteen seconds. That is how much time passed before I heard Annia’s desperate scream. I have relived that wait so many times. There was exactly enough time to walk twenty-one paces beyond the path and park my ass against a nearby tree. A goose honked three times in perfect rhythm. I locked eyes with a grazing goat long enough for it to snort and bury its nose in the grass again. A squirrel excitedly chattered above me. A woodpecker searched for food somewhere off in the distance. And then Annia’s scream. One minute, thirteen seconds was all it took from the time she left me to the time she violently used her vocal cords one final terrified time.
When I heard it, I bolted from the tree and found myself inside Ackgri’s walls before I knew my legs were carrying me there. The witch stood with both hands lifted in the air above Annia, a look of sheer confusion frozen within his paralyzed expression. Annia sat upon the ground facing my direction. Just as had happened with Racheele, her skin was aging at an impossibly rapid pace. She stared at me from some place of excruciating and desperate pain, and her eyes began to cloud over with that same milky whiteness that had filled the eyes of Racheele.
“No, no, no, no, no, no!” I screamed as I rushed toward them. Ackgri slowly lowered his hands and stood above her like a confused child watching his fallen ice cream melt on the hot concrete. “Don’t just stand there, witch! Do something. Stop this. Use your magic and fix this. Now!” I demanded. He did nothing.
As I bent down and took hold of my Annia, all remaining life officially left her, and her now aged body became completely still. I froze in place, not wanting to believe what I knew was the truth.
Ackgri’s baffled and silent expression did not change. He obviously did not understand what was happening to Annia, or he would not have been standing there the way he was.
Annia’s body continued to transform as it took on a sandy texture. Bits of what used to be her skin began crumbling off of her at an escalating pace. Eventually, the weight of her body became too much as the whole of her cells were supernaturally replaced. All at once, what was left of her disappeared into a giant plume of dust, which spread so thick into the air that I couldn’t see the witch whom I knew was standing only feet in front of me.
“What did you do?” I coughed furiously at Ackgri as I frantically scooped handfuls of my Annia together. “I brought her here to avoid such an end. What the hell have you done, witch?” I was too irate to cry. I don’t think I even believed it had happened again. How could it happen again? We had traveled all that way to make sure it would never happen.
As much as I didn’t want to believe it, I knew it had just happened. My Annia was abruptly and suddenly gone. Even the sheepskin that had clothed her somehow had transformed to dust. All that remained to prove she had been there at all was the blue stone necklace.
I’m sure it was all only seconds, but it felt like minutes had passed when Ackgri abruptly regained a strangely calm composure and squatted low enough to pull the stone from her remains.
“You killed her, witch. You killed my Annia,” I said through a tightened jaw. “Give that stone to me.”
Ackgri ignored me and cupped the necklace inside both of his closed hands, then pressed his mouth against them. He began chanting words of some kind into them, repeating the same strange phrase until a blue light appeared and eventually glowed so bright that the light could be seen through the flesh of his fingers. “This magic you brought here is not mine to alter,” he said as he held the stone out for me to take it from him.
I quickly snatched it from his palm, inappropriately unawed by whatever trick he had just performed to make a pebble start somehow producing its own light. “What do you mean? You said you could help us,” I cried.
He put a hand on my shoulder and I quickly shook it off again. “I could not foresee this,” he said. “Your curse is no common curse. Its magic has come from a place beyond my own limited understanding.” Despite my obvious disdain for his physical touch, he reached out again and patted my shoulder as if I were an animal. His voice remained unaffected by the event he had just witnessed. “I caution you, old man, to never again seek reprieve from this curse except by she who placed it upon you.” I glared at him with a look meant to kill him where he stood. “To do so,” he continued, “will lead only to death for many, and more darkness for you.”
I suddenly hated that man in that moment so much. If I had any physical energy left to feed that anger, I suppose I may have killed him right then, but my shock was paralyzing me so completely that I did nothing else, and I said nothing more. I just remained squatted there with hands full of ash, blaming and hating the old witch.
Ackgri stood and pointed at the stone I was holding. “Let the lasting light from it be a reminder to you that some magic cannot be taken from you. It will last as long as it was meant to last.” He paused for a moment. “Which for your curse means all time.”
My anger was suddenly replaced with somber defeat. I looked back at him in a miserable way that pleaded to please somehow find a way to undo what I knew could not be undone.
“Leave now, old man,” he said as he picked-up on my pathetic stare. He now seemed bothered that I was for some reason still there, stealing valuable time away from his life. “You shall keep your virility and burden me with this wretched suffering no further.”
I shook my head in disbelief at his lack of empathy, and began scooping together what I could of Annia, looking around the room as I did for anything I could use to carry what was left of her away with me.
“Did you not hear me? You must leave now,” the witch angrily demanded, losing his patience. He kicked a large pot onto its side, and gallons of water flooded across the ash pile, creating a wet mess that would be impossible for me to manage or contain. “Go,” he instructed.
Rage filled me. I lunged from the ground toward the witch, my arms outstretched and ready for battle. “Aferameta!” he said loudly and flicked his hands in my direction. An invisible force that felt like a rhino ramming me in the chest sent me flying back several feet. I stumbled onto my ass and struggled to catch the breath that had just been knocked from me. “Go,” he said again. Confused at his sudden coldness and scared by hi
s sudden power, I did as I was instructed, and I left Racheele’s remains behind with him.
CHAPTER 11
If the collaborators of The Old Testament hit one recurring nail on the head, it was the perception that all kinds of overly graphic, disturbing, and truly mystical shit constantly happened in those earliest days of modern man. If it wasn’t happening to you, it was happening to someone you knew; if it wasn’t happening to someone you knew, the rumors of astounding and magical events happening somewhere nearby were in frequent circulation.
I’ve read The Old Testament many times, including what existed of it long before the greatly altered versions most people know today. As time brought about inevitable onslaughts of new technologies, ideologies, and ways of living, just reading the book sometimes gives me a familiar sense of peace. I have never believed much more than a fraction of it. Most of its stories, like mine, were likely diced and spliced and in other ways altered before being added. I don’t read the Old Testament looking for some connection to God. I simply enjoy it because I am always reminded of the more simple and primitive way things used to be. I’m reminded of the way people spoke and the black and whiteness of the world which made everything so much better in some ways, and in other ways so much worse. The Old Testament for me, is like going home in a lot of ways.